![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Adding sexuality to the story just made it more ordinary for me. For one thing, she seems to be wearing high heels. Artfully retold and magnificently illustrated, this companion volume to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is made instantly accessible to children by a formidable childrens book partnership. I found the portrayal of her, as a naked Angelina Jolie, to be rather absurd. Beowulfs terrifying quest to destroy Grendel, the foul fiend, a hideous sea-hag and a monstrous fire-dragon is the oldest surviving epic in British literature. They've created a whole new plot about who slept with Grendel's mother, which feels clunky. I never had the sense of his enormous and terrifying strength. It may be an old story, yet it troubles and terrifies us now as much as it ever did, for we still fear the evil that stalks out there in the darkness and beyond. He is imagined as a pathetic creature - you feel as if he's being eaten from the inside by maggots. 'Hear and listen well, and I will tell you a tale that has been told for a thousand years and more. The monster, Grendel, is also rather diminished here. The minute he starts lying, he becomes less interesting. He becomes vulnerable and flawed, and he loses much of his nobility. The film changes the very nature of its hero. It's a brave, extraordinary thing, and I was entranced by the spectacle, but I'm afraid it left me cold in a way that the poem - an account of a mythical hero's battle with a terrifying monster - does not. I think it's wonderful that a 3D, computer-generated version of an epic poem set in sixth-century Denmark was made at all. ![]() A s someone who spends his life telling stories for children, I can't be sniffy about adapting Beowulf. ![]()
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